(a) Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a liquid crystal display.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A liquid crystal display (LCD) is one of the most widely used flat panel displays (FPD), and it is composed of two display panels on which field generating electrodes are formed, and a liquid crystal layer interposed between the two display panels. A voltage is applied to the field generating electrodes to generate an electric field on the liquid crystal layer, and the orientation of liquid crystal molecules of the liquid crystal layer is determined and the polarization of incident light is controlled through the generated electric field to display an image.
Among the LCDs, a vertical alignment (VA) mode LCD, which aligns LC molecules such that their long axes are perpendicular to the panels in the absence of an electric field, is spotlighted because of its high contrast ratio and wide reference viewing angle. A reference viewing angle is defined as a viewing angle that makes the contrast ratio equal to 1:10 or as a limit angle for inversion in luminance between the grays.
In the VA mode LCD, a wide viewing angle can be realized by cutouts such as minute slits in the field-generating electrodes and protrusions on the field-generating electrodes. Since the cutouts and protrusions can determine the tilt directions of the LC molecules, the tilt directions can be distributed in several ways by using the cutouts and protrusions such that the reference viewing angle is widened.
On the other hand, the VA mode liquid crystal display has lower side visibility compared with front visibility, such that one pixel is divided into two subpixels and a high voltage and a low voltage are applied to the two subpixels to solve this problem. Accordingly, the arrangement directions of the liquid crystal molecules corresponding to two subpixel electrodes are different, thereby improving the visibility of the right and left viewing angle directions.
According to the conventional method in which the pixel electrode is divided into two subpixel electrodes that are applied with different voltages to increase the visibility, it is advantageous for the size of the pixel area applied with the low voltage to be larger than the size of the pixel area applied with the high voltage for the improvement of visibility.
However, there may be a problem in that the brightness of the liquid crystal display is decreased according to the increasing of the size of the pixel area applied with the low voltage.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the disclosure and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.